The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian

This fresco was painted for the first altar on the left inside the church of Santa Maria di Brera, and a Saint Roch stood beside it, probably by Foppa as well. Sebastian and Roch were the two saints a Lombard city prayed to against plague, and they were paired on an altar for that reason. The Roch was taken down in 1787 and has been lost ever since. Then the church itself went. In 1808 the architect Pietro Gilardoni cut the building horizontally in two, so that the upper half could be turned into rooms for the new picture gallery, and the medieval facade was pulled down the year after. Foppa's Sebastian was detached from its wall in 1808 and carried up into the museum, which means it has never actually left the church. In the plaster you can still see the lines Foppa incised before he painted, and they show he moved the saint's right arm.